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PRAISE FOR THE DEVIL’S DAUGHTER
“A first-rate late ’50s NYC noir that hits all the right notes, weaving fiction, familiar real-life figures, and an affecting love story into a gripping tale of moral corruption that packs a physical and emotional punch.”
—MARK FROST, COCREATOR OF TWINPEAKS
“A gritty noir thriller reminiscent of the best of Ross Macdonald. The Devil’s Daughter spins a compelling tale of lust and greed in late 1950s New York. Combining singular fictional characters with some of the most famous real people of that era, it takes us on an unforgettable journey.”
DAVID MILCH, CREATOR OF DEADWOODAND COCREATOR OF NYPD BLUE
“SLICK PACING AND WELL-DRAWN DETAILS . . . [COFFEY] IS A HUGELY WINNING PROTAGONIST, AND GREISMAN KEEPS HIS FOOT ON THE GAS THROUGHOUT.”
PUBLISHERSWEEKLY
“A well-crafted throwback thriller.”
KIRKUSREVIEWS
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THE DEVIL’S DAUGHTER GORDON GREISMAN
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Copyright © 2024 by Gordon Greisman E-book published in 2024 by Blackstone Publishing Cover design by Bookfly
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Any historical figures and events referenced in this book are depicted in a fictitious manner All other characters and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Trade e-book ISBN 979-8-212-34255-1
Library e-book ISBN 979-8-212-34254-4 Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Private Investigators
Blackstone Publishing 31 Mistletoe Rd. Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com
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For Elinor
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
CONTENTS
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Acknowledgments About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
2022
I can’t hear a thing.
I have a hearing aid. It’s in the utility drawer in the kitchen, I think, but there’s an infernal buzzing whenever I wear it, like a mosquito circling over my bed in the dark on a summer night, so I never use it.
I can’t really see either.
I have three pairs of glasses—three because I usually don’t have the slightest idea where I put any one of them down. They have lenses as thick as double-glazed windows that make my eyes bulge like a cartoon character, but if I don’t wear them, the world has all the clarity of a Haley’s M-O commercial. Are there still commercials for Haley’s M-O? Is there still Haley’s M-O, for that matter? One of the many strange and disturbing things about living into your nineties is that the past has a way of collapsing in on itself. Something as trivial as an ad on TV that you’re sure you saw just a couple of days ago hasn’t actually aired in years. That collapse goes for people too, people who were once close friends, kids from the old neighborhood, guys I knew in the service, drinking buddies, mooks I took down or ones I put down, and—infinitely more distressing than all of them —women I once loved.
There weren’t that many. I was never one for the errant lay, not one of those guys who took imbecilic pride in the notches on their belt. Does anyone still say that? Notches on your belt? Probably not. Anyway, like I said, there weren’t that many. I lost my virginity to Mary O’Callahan, a kindly local pro, when I was thirteen, which proved to be far more terrifying than exciting. There were a few assignations and brief affairs after that, but as it turns out, I have to feel something a little more nourishing than passing lust.
Some of those people do turn up at the oddest times though. I can be combing what’s left of my hair when Edie Marx, an artsy girl I once had a fling with, suddenly appears in the bathroom mirror behind me, wearing nothing but one of my old white Oxford shirts and smoking an unfiltered Lucky. She blows a perfectly round smoke ring with a click of her jaw and asks if I want to go to the Vanguard later, Oscar’s quartet is playing, and she thinks Bud might be there.
Or I can be walking over to Queensboro Wine and Spirits in Stockbridge—hobbling over, is more like it—when Carmine Rizzo falls into step with me. He says The Chin wants a sit-down. I ask when, and he says, “How ’bout right now? No time like the present, Jack.”
I don’t say anything. I know Carmine isn’t really there. I know Edie isn’t either. I may be blind as a bat and deaf as a post, but I’m still playing with a full deck even if the cards have gotten a little frayed. I still recognize John Coltrane’s “Straight Street” from its first four notes, know that Gleyber Torres went three for four last night, and read Krugman’s column when the Times posts it online. And almost every day now, I FaceTime with Sarah, though it took her the better part of a freezing January afternoon to teach me how.
Tracy doesn’t appear as often as she used to, and that makes me sad. We were married for thirty-two years, and for months after she was gone, I would wake up in the morning not only expecting her to be curled up next
to me but sure that she was. I felt her hand in mine and her cheek warm against my shoulder, and it wasn’t until the fog of sleep and the haze of the two Klonopin I took the night before cleared from my head that I realized she wasn’t actually there.
I loved Tracy, but she wasn’t the love of my life, which I guess she knew. We were happy together but more comfortable than passionate. That not only annoyed the hell out of her, it hurt, and I’m still sorry about it. It’s not that we never made love, and it was always good when we did, but I was in my forties when we married, not exactly in my sexual prime. Tracy was younger, not obscenely so, but young enough to expect more than a kiss and a friendly squeeze on her behind when she crawled into bed with the man she loved. She told me that more than once, often in tears. I felt bad, promised to do better, and would for a month or two before falling back into the old routine of dozing off watching Johnny Carson or an old black-and-white movie on The Late Show. But we were content. That sounds like pretty weak sauce, but it was more than that. We were close, talked and laughed, shared secrets, took showers together, and read the Sunday paper on a bench in Washington Square Park when the weather was decent. And she loved it whenever Monk stopped by on his way uptown, or we went out to dinner with Bud and his latest. Tracy was generous and kind, put up with my moods, which could turn sour for no apparent reason, and never complained when I went out on a job and didn’t come home for a day or two. When I once asked her why she didn’t think I was cheating on her, Tracy smiled and said having an affair took effort and deceit and that I was too lazy to sneak around.
I was gutted when cancer took her. That was nearly twenty years ago, and I still miss her. I closed up the house in West Stockbridge then, holed up in our apartment on Perry Street, and wept. Sarah and the girls came by every couple of days with their arms full of groceries from Balducci’s and buzzed around the place chattering at me, hoping that would draw me out of
my funk. And eventually it did. Like I said, I loved Tracy, but the truth is, she wasn’t V.
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CHAPTER 2
1957
Richie Costello can’t stop staring at V, which is not only embarrassing but pretty inappropriate, considering he’s a priest. Actually, Richie is more than that. He’s a monsignor and executive secretary to Cardinal Spellman, the archbishop of New York. He looks the part too: his fingernails are manicured, his hair razor-cut, and the cassock he’s wearing is so expertly fitted that it could have been tailored on Savile Row. In fact, it probably was.
“Jack,” Richie says, “His Eminence would consider it a personal favor if you would look into the matter for him.” V’s sitting across the kitchen table from him, and he finally manages to wrest his eyes from her to me, adding, “Louis Garrett has given generously to the church, despite not being a member of the flock. And from what I understand, his daughter is basically a good kid, a little confused maybe, but what teenager isn’t?”
I know Richie from the old neighborhood. His family lived in a tenement on West Forty-Sixth near the corner of Eleventh Avenue. His father was a day laborer, and his mother went to noon mass at St. Malachy’s most every afternoon, which probably explains why Richie ended up the way he did.
“How long has she been gone?” I ask.
“Just a few nights. There’s probably a perfectly innocent explanation, but her father is very worried.”
“Then why doesn’t he call the police?”
“Mr. Garrett would rather keep it a private matter and only inform the authorities if it’s absolutely necessary.”
This kind of bullshit probably works for Richie most of the time, but if Garrett’s kid just snuck out to spend a couple of nights with her boyfriend, her father wouldn’t have sent an emissary from His Eminence the cardinal to have a guy like me find out what happened to her.
“Can I get you something a little stronger than that cup of coffee, Father?” V asks, getting up from my kitchen table. “You look like you could use it.”
She doesn’t wait for an answer. V goes to the sideboard, pours Richie three fingers of Irish over rocks, pours another three neat for herself, and flashes the monsignor a little cleavage when she sits back down. She’s being a wiseass on purpose, not just because Richie hasn’t been able to stop staring at her breasts, but because she’s made him for a phony and an officious little jerk. Where V comes from, that’s a mortal sin.
Thelonious Monk introduced us. There was an after-hours cutting contest at Minton’s, and when Kenny Kersey took over from him, Monk escorted the most beautiful woman I had ever seen over to my table. When I finally managed to recover from the shock, he told me her name was Vicky, but I already knew that. I hadn’t actually met Victoria Hemming before, but I’d seen her in ads in magazines and peeking seductively over a bare shoulder on billboards around town. Monk grinned and told me that I was going to spend the rest of my life with her, but I knew that wasn’t true. So did V, but she sat down anyway and offered to buy me a drink.
When I asked, she said she was from Texas, that her father was an oil wildcatter and her mother was a Houston society doyenne. When she was
sixteen, she took off with her boyfriend, crossed the state line into Louisiana, and married him. The marriage lasted a week. By the time she was eighteen, she was living in Paris and modeling for Christian Dior. He introduced her to a French count who V said was so handsome his looks nearly made her cry. He was twice her age, destitute, and lived off her, which she didn’t really mind. What she did mind was that Monsieur Le Compte was serially unfaithful, sleeping with every young model he could get his hands on before she finally threw him out. Her marriages may have failed, but her career was spectacularly successful. Now she’s chased around town by movie stars, jet-setting playboys, scions of vast family fortunes and their fathers. What she sees in me is a mystery.
“I can’t imagine this will take up too much of your time, Jack, and Mr. Garrett will pay handsomely for your services.” Richie knocks back half his drink in a gulp to settle his nerves. V is still toying with him, and I shoot her a look telling her to cut it out, but she ignores me. “It would be a real blessing if you can help the poor man out,” Richie says, rattling the ice in his glass. “It really would.”
My dad was raised a Catholic, but then he became a radical Wobbly and never stepped foot inside a church again. My mother was Jewish, a piece of information that was best kept under wraps in our neighborhood. She came from a lot of money, but her family cut her off when she married a goy, so we never saw a penny of it. I was raised to be suspicious of anyone sanctimonious enough to wear a collar, but being that I’m nearly broke right at the moment, I tell Richie I’ll do what I can.
“I can’t make any promises, but I’ll talk to this guy Garrett, if that’s what you want.”
“It’s not what I want, Jack, it’s what His Eminence wants.”
“Well, in that case, how can I possibly refuse?”
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CHAPTER 3
I’ve been taking the subway by myself since I was five. I’d take it now, but V is done up for a job, so instead of grabbing the Seventh Avenue Express at Fourteenth Street, we walk to Sixth and hail a cab.
This requires virtually no effort. Looking like she does, all V has to do is stand on the sidewalk and lift a finger, and every cabbie in the vicinity makes a beeline for us. A Checker beats the others to the punch. We slide into the back seat, and when Moe Moskowitz—Moe’s name and mug shot are on the taxi license pinned to his dashboard—finally stops gawking at V, we take off and head uptown.
Moe pulls to a stop in front of Avedon’s studio on East Forty-Ninth Street. V gives me a smooch before she gets out; then I tell Moe to take me crosstown to the Beresford on Central Park West.
The Beresford’s doorman, a human slab of cement in a Ruritanian uniform complete with gold brocade epaulets, accosts me the second I cross the building’s threshold.
“Can I help you with something?” he says, looking like he’d rather help crush my skull than do me any favors.
“I’m here to see Louis Garrett.”
“Is Mr. Garrett expecting you?”
“No, buddy, I’m the Fuller Brush man. Just call up to Garrett’s apartment and tell him Jack Coffey’s here.”
In other circumstances, the slab would have busted my nose for a crack like that, but he’s on duty and I might be somebody important, so he does what he’s told.
Now, I’m not entirely unfamiliar with how the other half lives. For starters, V’s apartment on Beekman Place is a very cushy prewar six. I don’t know why she prefers spending her nights in my quasi dump on Perry Street, but she does. And I’ve worked for a few Park Avenue swells who had nasty secrets and habits that I kept out of the papers and off the police blotter. Their places were pretty impressive, but none of them hold a candle to Louis Garrett’s sixteen-room luxury duplex. For one thing, the elevator goes right up into the apartment, which must be why the building’s management employs a guy like the slab to patrol the lobby.
I’m greeted by Garrett’s butler when the elevator doors open. He’s friendly, not the doddering Englishman in livery that I’d expected. He introduces himself as Burton—I don’t know whether that’s his first name or last—and he takes my hat and coat.
“Mr. Garrett is on the phone,” he says. “If you could just wait for him in the library.” I follow Burton into a room with floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcases and a panoramic view of the park. He asks if he can get me anything: a glass of water or a cup of coffee. I beg off and he says, “Mr. Garrett shouldn’t be very long,” before he leaves me alone.
There’s an antique writing desk in the center of the room. On it are three photographs in sterling silver frames, all of them featuring a pretty teenage girl, who I assume is Garrett’s daughter. One is formal, subtly lit, and obviously shot by a professional. Another is taken at a cotillion of some sort. The girl is wearing an evening gown, and she’s on the arm of a West Point cadet in full dress uniform. The last one is a vacation snap. In it she’s
smiling for the camera and looks genuinely happy. I’m holding the picture when Garrett walks into the room.
“She’s lovely, isn’t she?” Garrett says. He’s in his fifties and wearing an old cashmere sweater with a pinhole in one of the sleeves, a pair of baggy gray trousers, and bedroom slippers. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days and looks pale and drawn. “Thank you for coming on such short notice, Jack,” he says, and we shake hands.
“Not a problem,” I say. “Is this your daughter?” I show him the photograph.
“Yes. That’s my Lucy, and I’m worried sick about her. Do you mind if I pour myself a drink?” It’s ten o’clock in the morning, but the guy is upset, and I’m not going to begrudge him a little liquid fortitude. “Can I get you one?” he asks, but I shake my head. After he pours himself a jigger of scotch with a splash of soda, we take seats, Garrett behind the writing desk and me in a chair in front of it. Like I said, he looks like hell and I feel for the guy, but empathy isn’t what he wants from me.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened?” I say.
“Lucy was supposed to be spending the night with her friend Muffy.”
“That would be Muffy . . . ?”
“Palmer. Muffy Palmer. Her parents have an apartment at 998 Fifth Avenue across from the museum. Lucy has slept over there before, but she’s always home by noon the next day.”
“What did Muffy say when you called?”
“That she had been there that first night but left in the morning, and Muffy hadn’t seen or heard from her since.”
Somebody could have grabbed Lucy crossing through the park on her way home. That’s happened before. Some psycho could have raped and murdered her, then stashed her body behind a bush. I don’t tell Garrett that because it seems unnecessarily cruel, and I don’t know if it’s true. It could also be that somebody knows exactly who Lucy and her father are and
snatched her, counting on a king’s ransom for her return. That’s more likely, but I don’t tell Garrett that either. The guy’s rattled enough as it is.
“Talk to me about Lucy,” I say instead. “What’s she like?”
Garrett shuts his eyes and inhales like the thought of his missing daughter and what might have become of her is physically painful. I expect him to say that she’s the light of his life and that he’s terrified something terrible has happened to her, but he surprises me.
He says nothing. Maybe it’s a lump in his throat, but I don’t make Garrett for the type to burst into tears, so I’m not sure.
“Are you and Lucy close?” I ask.
“Yes, very,” is all he can manage before bolting his drink, and now I think the guy really is doing his best to hold it together.
“What about Lucy’s mother? She must be worried.”
“She passed away years ago, I’m afraid—giving birth to Lucy.”
Of course, this makes me feel like a first-class shit, and as if to prove that I am, Garrett rummages in one of his desk drawers, pulls out a photograph of his wife, and slides it across to me. Garrett’s wife couldn’t have been too much older than his daughter now when it was taken, and Lucy looks just like her.
“I’ve raised her on my own,” Garrett says. “Fortunately, I’ve been able to give her the best of everything—which means I spoiled her, I guess. Look, I’m not going to lie to you, Jack, Lucy can be pretty wild. She’s stubborn and used to getting what she wants. I don’t always approve of her friends either.”
“Friends like who?”
“Like Rex Halsey. A real bad egg, that one. I’m sure you know the type. Too smooth, too charming, and far too old for her. But I don’t think Lucy’s with him now though.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I paid him a lot of money to go away.”
I don’t have the heart to tell Garrett that writing a check to a guy like the one he just described doesn’t guarantee anything, not unless you hire a little muscle to back it up. But then, maybe that’s what he did. Maybe the slab of cement in the lobby does more than carry packages and whistle for cabs.
“Mr. Garrett, I need you to level with me. Are you sure this isn’t some stunt Lucy’s pulling? I mean, is she annoyed with you for some reason? Forgive me, but rich kids are like that, and you said she’s used to getting her own way. Muffy Palmer could be lying for her. Maybe Lucy has been with her the whole time.”
Before Garrett has a chance to answer, a woman enters the room without bothering to knock. She looks about forty, wears a cream-colored blouse and an ankle-length tweed skirt, has tortoiseshell glasses propped on the top of her head, and her hair is in a bun held together by a yellow number-two pencil. “Mr. Garrett, your meeting downtown is in an hour, and I’m sure you’ll want to shower and shave before you go. Then you have lunch at the Colony at one, the lawyers at three, and I called over to the Statler. Mario is happy to come by anytime you’d like to cut your hair.”
“This is my secretary, Lillian Crouse,” Garrett says by way of introduction. “Jack is helping me with Lucy.”
I smile and nod, but Lillian doesn’t acknowledge me in any way.
Instead, she says, “Your car is already waiting downstairs,” turns, and leaves without another word.
“No, Jack. Believe me, this isn’t a stunt,” Garrett says, answering the question I asked before Lillian walked in. “Something’s happened to Lucy, I’m sure of it, and I want you to find out what it is.”
I’m happy to charge Garrett my usual fee, a hundred a day plus expenses, but before I can tell him that, he offers me ten grand as a retainer and another ten as a bonus if I bring Lucy home safe and sound. Before I accept, I gently broach the possibility that she might have been kidnapped. I say that if he gets a ransom demand, he needs to inform the police
immediately, and that if he doesn’t, I will. Kidnapping is a federal offense, and as much as I understand his desire to keep this whole business under wraps, I’m not about to get myself in hot water with the FBI at any price.
Riding down in the elevator with Garrett’s check in my pocket, I’m thinking my first move is obvious. I’ll go over to Muffy Palmer’s apartment, and with any luck Lucy has holed herself up there just to torture her old man, making my bonus the easiest money I’ve ever made. The elevator reaches the lobby, the doors open, and there’s a beefy guy in a suit and tie waiting for me to get off. I don’t know who he is, but somehow he knows me.
“You must be Jack Coffey,” he says, sticking out his hand. “I’m Bob Carson. I work with Lou Garrett.”
I don’t mind glad-handers like Carson. They’re usually harmless and sometimes they’re useful. If you want tickets to a fight or a show or dinner reservations at some place that doesn’t know you from Adam, Bob Carson is your man.
“It’s a shame about Lucy,” he says. “She really is a sweet kid.”
“Why is it a shame?”
“Just that she’s taken off. It’s not the first time either. Lou does the best that he can with her, but Lucy’s a real handful.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say, and Carson steps onto the elevator as I step off, but before the doors close, he reaches into the breast pocket of his suit and hands me a business card. I glance down at his card. All it says is “Carson & Co.” and a telephone number. I’m not sure what good it will do me, but I slip it into my jacket pocket before I leave.
“Give me a call if you need anything, Jack,” he says. “I mean it. Anything at all.” And he rides the elevator up and out of sight.
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CHAPTER 4
“I’m sure Mr. Garrett is worried sick, so you need to tell this gentleman the truth, Muffin.”
“But I promised, Mama.”
“I don’t care what you promised, young lady, you’ll tell Mr. Coffey everything he needs to know and you’ll do it right this minute!”
Muffin Palmer, known for obvious reasons as “Muffy,” is a plainlooking sixteen-year-old girl with stringy blond hair and a pale complexion currently in the throes of a bout with acne. She’s sitting on a couch in the family living room. The room is plush, full of antique furniture and neomodern art, but feels cold like a high-end interior designer with an attitude has had at it. Her mother, a whippet-thin woman with a mean streak, is standing over her.
“Lucy wasn’t really here at all, was she?” I ask gently.
When Muffy hesitates, her mother barks, “Answer Mr. Coffey!” loud enough to give the kid a start.
“Okay! Okay, I said she was here, but she wasn’t. Lucy told me that if her father called, I should say she slept over, but she really didn’t.”
“You lied to Mr. Garrett!” A vein is pulsating in Mrs. Palmer’s neck, but if she keeps browbeating her kid, I’m not going to be able to find out anything, so I take the woman aside and say that if she could just leave me
and Muffy alone for a few minutes, I’ll get her daughter to tell me what I need to know and get out of her hair.
“I won’t tolerate lying, Mr. Coffey. I just won’t.”
“I get that, but why don’t you give me a chance to find out what really went on? Can you do that for me?” I don’t wait for an answer. Instead, I usher Mrs. Palmer out of the room and close the door behind her.
“How long have you and Lucy been friends?” I ask, pulling up a chair opposite Muffy.
“Since fifth grade,” she says. “I mean, we haven’t been friends the whole time or anything. Only since last year. She didn’t talk to me very much before that.”
“And this isn’t the first time you lied to her dad, is it?” Muffy scratches at a nonexistent itch and stares into her lap. “Don’t worry,” I say, smiling as if we’re about to share a secret. “I won’t tell your mother. I don’t want you to get in trouble, Muffy, but I do need to know the truth.”
“It’s not like she never slept over. I mean, she did once, but—”
“Do you know where Lucy is now?”
Muffy chews on a thumbnail and won’t look me in the eye.
“Is she with Rex Halsey?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
This poor kid is being played. Muffy is a little bit homely and more than a little bit lonely. Lucy Garrett is pretty and popular. A girl like that always has a factotum, someone to do her bidding, someone she can use when it suits her, then discard.
“Have you ever met Rex?”
“No, but Lucy told me all about him. He’s like really handsome and older, so he can get her into all these cool places. Do you know the Blue Note?”
I’ve spent half my life in joints like the Blue Note, and when I nod, Muffy says, “Rex takes her there sometimes. And to Birdland. And
Minton’s Playhouse up in Harlem. I’d be too scared to go there, but Lucy is just so brave.”
I’m thinking Monk probably knows this guy. If he’s a regular at Minton’s, Monk must. “Is that all they do together? Go to jazz clubs like Minton’s?”
“They do other stuff too. Rex knows all these negro musicians. You’re going to think this is really bad and she made me promise not to tell anybody, but she says that she smokes marijuana with them. I don’t know if I believe her, though. Lucy likes to make up stuff.”
“Do you know if Rex ever takes her up to his apartment?”
“I don’t think so. They go to a hotel sometimes, but please don’t tell anybody that. I mean, if my mother or Mr. Garrett finds out . . . just don’t say it was me, okay? Lucy will kill me.”
“When was the last time you really did see her?”
“At school on Friday. She sits in front of me in bio.”
“And you really don’t know where she is now.”
“No,” Muffy says, blowing her nose into a lace handkerchief. “I’d tell you if I did. I swear I would.”
Sweet little Lucy Garrett, the apple of her father’s eye, is smoking weed and sleeping with Rex Halsey, a guy twice her age.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” I ask V. We’re taking a bath together. The tub is in my kitchen, a quirk of living in four rooms in the West Village.
“At least she’s not dead,” V says, examining my back for pustules and blackheads. I think it’s disgusting, but V calls it primate grooming and gets a kick out of it.
“There’s a cheery thought.”
“Didn’t you think she might be?”
“Yeah. I guess, Rex doesn’t want to kill her, he’s only after her money.”
“Or maybe he just likes young girls.”
“Or both. You know, it might be as simple as Lucy’s gotten in over her head. A teenage kid rebelling against her father hooks up with a sleaze without knowing what she’s in for. It happens all the time.”
“Whoever this Halsey is sounds like a real bum to me.”
V gets this word from Toots. Everybody’s a bum as far as Toots Shor is concerned. But she’s right about Halsey. He is a bum, though I’ll bet he scares easy.
I’ll dig him up, make a few not-so-veiled threats, and that should make him back off. Lucy will kick and scream, hollering about how much she hates her father and loves Rex, that they’re going to run away together and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. She might even take a swing at me.
Maybe I’ll bring my buddy Carmine along as muscle.
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CHAPTER 5
I was fourteen the first time I snuck into Minton’s Playhouse. Teddy Hill had put together a house band: Joe Guy on trumpet, Nick Fenton on bass, Kenny Clarke on drums, and Charlie Christian on guitar. When they wouldn’t let me in the front door, I went around the back and slipped in through the kitchen when one of the busboys went out for a smoke. That Monday night was celebrity night. Dizzy and Bird were there. So were Don Byas, Coleman Hawkins, and Ben Webster. I got a slap from the old man when I crept back into the apartment at four in the morning, but I didn’t care. And I kept going back.
When I got home from overseas, there were new faces: Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro, Art Blakey, and Miles Davis, who was as young as I was. And there was always Monk. He was there that very first night and most every night after that, and I could have listened to him play forever. He would sit at the piano in a sharp suit, shades, and a fez and get so carried away by an aggressive attack or a wildly improvised melodic twist that he would suddenly stop, stand up, and dance around the piano before sitting back down to pick up where he left off.
Tonight when I walk into Minton’s, Monk is at the piano inventing a riff with switch key releases, silences, and hesitations. I sit and soak it in until
he finally takes a break and comes over to the table with a snifter of bourbon in his hand and a cigarette dangling from his lips.
“Where is she?” He means V.
“Every girl needs her beauty rest, Monk.”
“That one doesn’t. She could be up for a week and still turn every head in this joint. I still don’t get what she sees in you, boyo.” Monk likes to call me boyo or boychick, a tribute to my mixed parentage, I guess.
We listen to Lester Young wheel and dive on his sax for a minute or two before I ask, “Listen, do you know a guy named Rex Halsey? Thirty, thirtyfive maybe. Slick. Real good-looking, from what I understand.”
“Don’t know him, but I’ve seen him. Always has a young white chick on his arm.”
I reach into my jacket pocket for the vacation snap of Lucy Garrett I cadged from her father and show it to Monk. “Did he ever come in with her?”
Monk takes a look and says, “Oh, yeah. She’s one of them.”
“What do you mean by one of them?”
“The cat’s a pimp, Jack. He deals reefer too. At least that’s what the boys tell me.”
Bourbon is Monk’s drug of choice these days, and he’s way too fond of it. There have been plenty of nights when he’s been so deep in the bag that he couldn’t make it home on his own. I’d bundle him into a cab and tell the driver to collect the fare from Monk’s wife, Nellie. Every other player I know smokes reefer, shoots smack, or does both. So did Monk until Nellie straightened him out.
“How old is she supposed to be?” Monk asks, handing me back Lucy’s photograph.
“Sixteen,” I say.
“Sixteen, huh? That sounds about right.”
None of this should shock me, but it does. In my line you see a lot of scandalous, even perverse, behavior, but never involving a kid. That Lucy is off doing things she shouldn’t while her father thinks she’s playing Mystery Date on the floor of Muffy Palmer’s bedroom isn’t necessarily a surprise, but turning tricks for the likes of Rex Halsey? I told V I thought Lucy might be in over her head. Now I’m sure she is. I had Rex down as a gold digger, not a pimp hustling underage girls. A pretty little thing like Lucy Garrett must fetch a hefty price. But who’s paying it? And how did he get Lucy to go along with it? I can see her being out for a cheap thrill, slumming to give the girls at school something to gossip about, but selling her body to some Park Avenue plutocrat just to please Rex Halsey? That I don’t see. And now I’m angry. No matter how much trouble Lucy Garrett makes, she’s still just a child. Halsey is not only exploiting her but abusing her—even if she doesn’t realize it. It’s sick and twisted and I’m going to put a stop to it, but first I have to find the son of a bitch.
I think about spending a few nights hanging around Minton’s waiting for Rex to show up, but there’s no telling how long that could take. Anyway, I’m not the type to sit on my thumbs. That Halsey deals drugs makes it easier. He’s got to have a supplier, and I have a pretty good idea who that might be.
I met Carmine Rizzo in 1944—“met him” sounds like somebody introduced us at a rent party or over drinks at O’Doul’s. We actually met crouching in a hole in the ground, trying not to get our heads blown off by a German eighty-eight firing for effect. We were assigned to cross the Moselle at Pont-á-Mousson, but the Krauts were kicking our ass from the high ground on the other side of the river. There’s no place like a foxhole to make a friend for life, even if that friend turns out to be not only a soldier in the Eightieth Infantry but one in the Genovese crime family. Actually, our friendship became kind of convenient in my later line of work. And considering most of the drug trade in Manhattan is controlled by Vito
Genovese’s right-hand man Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, knowing Carmine is a definite plus.
I know I can find Carmine at the Triangle Social Club on Sullivan Street in the West Village. The Chin holds court there. It’s not much more than a bar with an espresso machine, but it’s across the street from Gigante’s mother’s apartment, and he and his old lady are close. Now, ordinarily, if a guy like me walks into the Triangle uninvited, he gets his legs broken. The Chin gives me the eye when I come in the door, and I can tell he’s thinking he’ll have one of his boys do just that, but then Carmine vouches for me, so Gigante doesn’t say anything when I take a seat. It’s three in the morning and the last thing I ought to be doing is drinking the double espresso Carmine is drawing for me, but I need his help and it pays to be sociable.
“What do you want that pimp for?” he says when I ask about Halsey. Then he leans in close so Gigante can’t hear him and says, “The only reason we haven’t iced that fucker is The Chin likes ’em young, you know what I’m sayin’?”
Color me shocked.
“Halsey deals for you too, doesn’t he?”
“Strictly small time, Jack. Nickels and dimes.”
“How does it work with him and the girls?”
“We don’t let him come in here, that’s for damn sure. The girls do, but not him.”
I show Carmine Lucy’s photograph. “She ever been in?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t recognize her,” which comes as a relief. The Chin has an apelike quality, and the idea of Lucy turning a trick with him upsets my stomach.
“Do you know how I can get ahold of him?”
“Halsey? No idea. We pay a neighborhood kid to run him dime bags. The kid does a dead drop someplace in the park, but I don’t know where
